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Information is a public good per communications prof Pickard

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This is a discussion of a Zoom interview to be recorded 2024-12-13 with communications professor Victor Pickard about his research discussing how information is a public good and the public policy implications of that claim. A 29:00 mm:ss podcast excerpted from the companion video will be posted here after it is released to the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show[1] syndicated for the Pacifica Radio[2] Network of over 200 community radio stations.[3]
It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources[4] and treating others with respect.[5]
Interview claiming that information is a public good and discussing market failures in for-profit media according to Victor Pickard, communications professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania

Victor Pickard discusses how information is a public good and public policy implications of that claim. He is interviewed by Spencer Graves.[6]

Primary concerns

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It is in your best interests and mine to help supporters of our worst enemies get information they want, because doing so will make it harder for their leaders and ours to convince us to support policies that may threaten our lives and futures to please those who control most of the money for the media. Research suggests that better media reduces political corruption and improves the quality of life for the vast majority. News deserts, ghost newspapers, and major media conglomerates have the opposite effect, encouraging public officials to focus less on protecting the interests of voters and often clandestinely reward campaign contributors to the detriment of the electorate.

Commercial media are not likely to expose this corruption, because they make money selling advertising to the beneficiaries of that political corruption and from increasing political polarization and violence.[7] If we look at how the major media in the US are generally funded, "Their business model ... at least for about 125 years or so has been advertising. ... This really developed somewhere in the mid to late 1800s".[8] The newspaper industry, "even in its beleaguered state, is still the source of most of our original reporting, original news and information that gets disseminated. So newspapers have historically been sort of the information feeders for our entire media ecosystem. ... But actually, media subsidies are as American as apple pie. Going back to our first major communication system, which was the postal system, and our newspapers were tremendously subsidized."

"Then there was this transformation of the logic driving our newspaper industry, ... this primary business model was to deliver audiences to advertisers. ... That began to come apart in the early 2000s, when readers and advertisers migrated to the web ... . There is no viable economic model to support the level of journalism that democracy requires. We have to start thinking about other models ... ."

Earlier this year, Pickard published an article with Neff, which compared newspapers in 33 different countries.[9] "In a kind of comparative framework ... we are literally off the chart for how little we fund our public media. ... At a national level it comes to ... a little bit over a $1.50 per person per year that we pay at the Federal level towards our public media. If you throw in local and regional and state subsidies, it gets up to a little bit over $3 per person per year. Now compare that to the Brits, who spend about $100 per person per year for the BBC. Or look at northern European countries where they're spending far more than that."

Conservative organizations that evaluate the level of democracy have found that "the strongest democracies on the planet ... also happen to have the strongest public media systems on the planet. ... These same institutions have qualified the US as being a flawed democracy. We've been considered a flawed democracy for a number of years now. And, of course, we have a very weakly funded public broadcasting system. So what this shows at the very least, is that if you publicly subsidize your media systems, your public media systems, if you make those public investments in the news and information that democracy requires, these countries are not sliding into totalitarianism. They're not becoming fascist countries overnight. Quite the contrary. They're they're very strong. There are shining exemplars of democratic countries. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't also be concerned about state capture of public media systems, and we can point to some cautionary tales like in Turkey and Hungary and Poland, you know, that can happen. But those are the exceptions. Most of these strong democracies have strong public broadcasting systems, public media systems. So I would argue that that should also be part of our redemocratization project here in the United States is to actually fund our public media so that they don't have to rely on private funders. NPR gets more than a third of its money from corporate funding, which sort of defeats the purpose.. It's a misnomer even to call it public broadcasting if they're taking in all this corporate money, and any casual listener or viewer of NPR and PBS will have to sit through what's uphemistically called enhanced underwriting. ... That's kind of absurd for a public media system. So we need to change that. But I do think that that's something we need to focus on more. We need to really build out our public media systems so that it can serve local information needs."

McChesney and Nichols (2021, 2022) recommend distributing 0.15% of national income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP) to local news nonprofits on the basis of local elections. Pickard likes their model but prefers other alternatives, like local news bureaus managed by local people elected their boards or selected at random, similar to jury duty. The main point is to provide public funding not censored by other government bureaucrats nor corporate bureaucrats.

Pickard continues, "We basically want a system that allows journalists to be journalists, to do the work that originally drew them to the craft ... . Profit a driven media is always going to privilege profits over democracy."

About Pickard

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Pickard is a media studies scholar and a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on the intersections of US and global media activism and politics and the role of the media in political economy.[10] He is also the Chair of the Board of Free Press. He has written or edited six books,[11] including (2015) America's Battle for Media Democracy,[12] and (2020) Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society.[13]

The threat

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Internet company executives have knowingly increased political polarization and violence including the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, because doing otherwise might have reduced their profits. Documentation of this is summarized in Category:Media reform to improve democracy.

Discussion

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[Interested readers are invite to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources[4] and treating others with respect.[5]]

Notes

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  1. ↑ Media & Democracy, Director: Spencer Graves, Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q127839818{{citation}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  2. ↑ Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q2045587
  3. ↑ List of Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates, Wikidata Q6593294
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 The rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources may not be enforced on other parts of Wikiversity. However, they can facilitate dialog between people with dramatically different beliefs
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Wikiversity asks contributors to assume good faith, similar to Wikipedia. The rule in Wikinews is different: Contributors there are asked to "Don't assume things; be skeptical about everything." That's wise. However, we should still treat others with respect while being skeptical.
  6. ↑ Spencer Graves, Wikidata Q56452480
  7. ↑ Pickard (2020, 2023). See also Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government.
  8. ↑ This interview also briefly mentioned John and Silberstein-Loeb, ed (2015). Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, cited by Pickard (2020), which places these changes in a much broader context. McChesney and Nichols have suggested that that most people alive today benefit from subsidies for newspapers in the US in the early 1800s, even though they've never read those newspapers. This follows, because those newspapers encouraged literacy and limited political corruption, both of which helped the new US stay together and grow both in land area and economically, while contemporary New Spain / Mexico fractured, shrank, and stagnated economically. For more on this, see The Great American Paradox. People in other countries benefit from scientific advances that would not have occurred without that diverse media environment in the US before media consolidation began in the late 1800s.
  9. ↑ Neff and Pickard (2024).
  10. ↑ Victor Pickard.
  11. ↑ Free Press Board, Free Press, Wikidata Q131398406
  12. ↑ Pickard (2015)
  13. ↑ Pickard (2020).

Bibliography

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